Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: What does mastery look like in software engineering?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 290 posts

Re: Ask HN: What does mastery look like in software engineering?

#91

Post by jgwil2 »

whatshisface wrote: post #14
thedevindevops wrote: post #5

Pai Mei mustache, sits on a rock meditating and dispensing advice to juniors, quotes Martin Fowler by heart, seems to never touch a keyboard but every commit will replace entire module(s) flawlessly, demonstrating high level architectural knowledge that lies on the far side of the organisation's learning curve.

> but every commit will replace entire module(s) flawlessly That's big commits, you're not supposed to do that. Masters commit individual characters that replace entire modules flawlessly.

He squashes commits on merge.

Re: Ask HN: What does mastery look like in software engineering?

#93

Post by rramadass »

throwii wrote: post #26
dumbfoundded wrote: post #20

IMO it's about understanding the solution curve in the problem space. Every problem type has a range of possible solutions. Most of these solutions are wrong and a few are correct with different tradeoffs. When you can't do better without making tradeoffs, you're on the curve. Novice engineers will struggle to get something done. Intermediate engineers can get things done but fail to see the tradeoffs. Expert enginee…

How do you learn that solution curve and their tradeoffs? Swap jobs and hope you see them all in your lifetime? Read articles and hope you pick everything up correctly?

Recognition Primed Decision Model - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recognition_primed_decision

Naturalistic Decision Making - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalistic_decision-making

Re: Ask HN: What does mastery look like in software engineering?

#94

Post by taphangum »

itsmejeff wrote: post #85

I’ve been pondering this a lot lately, as an engineering leader. Masters in my organization have an extremely high ratio of value shipped to hours worked. This means two things. They are able to discern and avoid work that does not provide value (this is often their greatest skill), and the best ones can direct a whole team away from large swaths of work that is not valuable. And they are able to build systems such t…

Fantastic definition.

Re: Ask HN: What does mastery look like in software engineering?

#95

Post by rramadass »

abdabab wrote: post #10
jugjug wrote: post #4

I think of Rich Hickey [1]: helping others to understand the code faster by identifying and removing most of the accidental complexity. [1] https://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy/

This reminds me of a talk of Linus Torvalds. From this perspective, mastery can be seen as an acquired taste that came after doing a large volume of work.

Can you please link the talk?

Re: Ask HN: What does mastery look like in software engineering?

#96

Post by steve_adams_86 »

SOLAR_FIELDS wrote: post #73
agumonkey wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I fail to decrypt who TJ can be

TJ Holowaychuk, who has written some of the most popular Node.js libraries. Express.js is probably the one most have heard of. He now operates in the Go space in which I presume he also has some influence as well for OP to bother mentioning. I would say that his handiwork in crafting good libraries was a significant reason that Node took off like it did so quickly. This article from 2014 highlights just how many libr…

I don’t hear about his work often anymore, but I always appreciated his insights and how humble he was. Definitely seemed like the kind of person I’d like to work with and learn from. Though I suppose I did indirectly - I dug through his libraries for years out of curiosity and necessity.

Re: Ask HN: What does mastery look like in software engineering?

#97

Post by davmar »

I don't know, but I one practice along my journey has had a surprising impact upon my skill development. That one thing is: I started coding in VIM. For some reason, making that change has improved my thinking, and that's been a big part of my growth.

So, maybe you'll find that to be a helpful practice as well. It's worth a try.

Re: Ask HN: What does mastery look like in software engineering?

#98

Post by rramadass »

permille42 wrote: post #40
throwaway889900 wrote: post #11

Fabrice Bellard, the mind behind FFMpeg and QEMU.

He is one of 3 people that came to mind immediately reading this post. One of his latest creations, QuickJS, is quite remarkable. The other two I thought of are Peter Norton and Linus Torvalds. Fabrice, despite his tremendous contributions to the field, doesn't reach for acclaim and just seems to go his own way. Peter Norton was a genius in his field. His book on Assembly Language was one of my favorites as a youth.…

>Linus, as the namesake for Linux also made a huge impact on the field... and comes off as somewhat of an uncontrolled lunatic.

What? Linus is one of the most Rational, Direct, No-Nonsense, Get Things Done Leader there is. Whenever i hear some self-appointed "expert" pontificate on Leadership/Management/etc. i always think of what Linus would say/do in that situation. People only think of him as a "Technical Guy" but his Leadership/Management of something so vital, so huge, so distributed, with so many "employees" and with so few resources, so many stakeholders is what is amazing to me. Nobody comes close.

You really need to take back the "uncontrolled lunatic" phrase.

Re: Ask HN: What does mastery look like in software engineering?

#100

Post by yowlingcat »

itsmejeff wrote: post #85

I’ve been pondering this a lot lately, as an engineering leader. Masters in my organization have an extremely high ratio of value shipped to hours worked. This means two things. They are able to discern and avoid work that does not provide value (this is often their greatest skill), and the best ones can direct a whole team away from large swaths of work that is not valuable. And they are able to build systems such t…

> the best ones can direct a whole team away from large swaths of work that is not valuable

Can't overstate how valuable this is. A team which can expose its members to this kind of leadership by example and direct collaboration will grow and outproduce teams which don't by an order of magnitude.

Post reply on HN